What We See 01: Tentstation

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Jen Metcalf:

Berlin was once a city of empty spaces. Many were voids created by bombed-out buildings from the war, and a wide scar left by the death strip that sliced the city in half for 28 cruel years. I didn’t move to Berlin, didn’t start “building my Berlin” like a Colson-Whitehead New Yorker, until 2006. But even then – decades after the bombs had stopped falling, the Wall had been chipped away, and the city had stitched itself back together – even then, Berlin was a city of vacancies.

The year I arrived, one of them, a former lido, had become a campsite. Tentstation. It occupied a leafy, paused space smack-bang in the centre of Berlin, right by the shiny new main station. Prime real estate given over to four young Germans on a temporary contract that should have ended after one year, but went on for six. 

The lido’s 50-metre pool remained, drained of water, but still blue-painted and with graffiti splashed over the walls. A basketball net had been fixed up in the deep end. The diving blocks and diving boards stood motionless at the edge, waiting for the swimmers to return. Instead, they got young backpackers, local clubbers, and fashion shows. Then the dancers came.

That was us. A patchwork community of lindy hoppers. We were scientists, teachers, office workers, freelancers. We were in our 20s and still new to the city, or in our 70s and part of the fabric since the days of the Wall. Most evenings we could find each other in spaces all over the city and dance the day out of ourselves to Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and all that jazz. A world away from the techno thudding in Berghain or Weekend.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

Sometime around 2009, we began gathering by the pool on summer Sundays, surrounded by trees heavy with leaves, the needled disco ball of the TV Tower just visible over the top. As we walked down the path from the campsite entrance, the rumble of the city faded, replaced by the DJ’s music weaving through the bushes to meet us. At first just the suggestion of that familiar eight-count beat, the rise and fall of a song. Then hooting trumpets, rolling drums, and Ella singing louder until we were there, at the edge of the pool, its blue floor already part-filled with couples connected in an easy embrace, bouncing and twisting their steps to the beat. One, two, triple-step, one, two, triple-step. On and on in a hundred different variations as the sun set, the fairy lights clicked on, and the night air began to cool our sweat-soaked skin. 

After those evenings I would cycle home, breathless and in flight. Soaring past the Reichstag, through the Brandenburg Gate, and down Unter den Linden. All of Berlin’s proudest buildings and boulevards lit up against the ink-black sky, carrying their centuries of history forward in steadfast, unforgettable bricks and mortar that are familiar even to those who have never visited. 

Tentstation was never going to join those ranks. They are out of its league. And anyway, it was never meant to survive. After six summers, the actual owners of the land were finally ready to send in the diggers. I never saw the construction site, never watched the heavy machinery in action, but I recently found a photograph online. A still life of a death. A white digger is parked by the pool. Its steel teeth have ripped up the grass where the tents once stood, turned it into mounds of dirt and excavated a mess of cables that might be electricity, or maybe they have been brought there by construction workers – ready to tie around a diving board and rip it out of the ground. The pool’s blue, graffitied walls are torn at regular, blocky intervals that suggest the teeth of the digger’s bucket have been gnawing at it. 

When the ground was level and the diggers had retreated, the architects and their team moved in. They built a new, shallower pool, surrounded it with timbered patios, sun loungers, and low-roofed buildings. This is Vabali Spa. It offers Eastern-themed wellness and overnight stays to white-robed, well-off customers. I hear it’s very popular, though I haven’t seen it for myself. This description is entirely thanks to Google Images. A few Christmases ago a client of mine gave me a voucher for a day’s pampering there. It occurs to me now that I must have mislaid it. 

And so the void disappeared. Of course it wasn’t the first, and it was small fry by comparison. This is Berlin. The city is laden with places that were once hollow ghosts of the past, now restored to their former grandeur, or filled with bustling office districts, tourist sites, and shopping zones. Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, Alexanderplatz, and all the buildings we dancers flew past as we cycled home beneath the sky over Berlin. Chances are good that you’ve heard of them all. But I doubt you’ve heard of Tentstation.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

So many parts of a city are never visible to those who don’t live here – never even visible to all those who do live here. My boyfriend has been a Berliner since the 1990s. He is an honest-to-goodness German, not just a card-carrying one like me. And still he had never heard of Tentstation. Why would he have? He has built a different Berlin to mine, one constructed of people I will never know, places I will never remember. 

And yet all of Berlin’s small, secret places like the pool live on, even once they are gone. Not because they are so solid a war can’t crumble them, or so important that they will be rebuilt. But because we were there, danced among their graffiti, took care not to step backwards into the deep end, found friends and a skill we never knew we had. They survive because – to borrow again from the great Colson Whitehead – “what was there before is more real and solid to us than what is there now”.

***

Jen Metcalf is a copywriter, translator, and editor who arrived in Berlin in 2006 and accidentally made it her home. Having spent most of her adult life working on other people’s texts, she recently decided to start creating her own. Berlin is a recurring feature in her essays, which she uses to try and understand her place in a city that now feels like a partner in a long-term relationship -- with all the joy, disappointment and compromises that entails. 

Photos by Joerg Heidemann, who organised the swing dance evenings at Tentstation (and DJ'd and danced at them, too).

Portraits of War: Anastasiya

This is the seventh in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

As Anastasiya Volokita and I walk back towards Friedrichshagen station from the Müggelsee, we are talking about her Mum, her sister and her young niece, all of whom have managed to settle in a small Polish town, having escaped Ukraine. Her Mum, she says, used to be a bank teller but now cleans posh apartments for a living. It's okay, says Anastasiya, she likes it there and it's better than nothing. 

It's better than war, she says.

But then a cat crosses our path. The cat is a mess, its mangy fur is patchy at best, its ribs poking through. It limps sadly, like a drunken old man trying to get back to his empty home, far too late.

Anastasiya's got a cat, named Mushka Mukhich, that a friend brought out of Ukraine via Czechia to  to Poland. Anastasiya picked her up from there. Mushka Mukhich is a well travelled cat. She loves cats, and the state of this one floors her. We stop, she asks about where to find an animal shelter at this time of the evening; I've no idea, it's Friedrichshagen, it's May and the sun is already starting to set. She worries, asking two teenage girls passing if they can help. 

They can't.

A woman with a zimmer-frame comes slowly past, but she stops only to say how she loves Anastasiya's hair, intricate long plaits tightly, precisely woven with Ukrainian blue and yellow thread. 

And I too have to go. Anastasiya says it's fine. She'll take care of it, somehow.

She is wearing a black hoodie that she has zipped up, and pulls over her hands when the wind gets up as it does over the Müggelsee at this time of year – at any time of year. She has a pair of blue jeans that a friend gave her, and simple white toed trainers that were bought for her by a guy she met when she realised that she would be stuck in Berlin for a long time yet.

Because she'd never meant to stay. Anastasiya Volokita had just come to Berlin on the 22nd of February to celebrate her birthday three days later. But the most recent incarnation of the war in Ukraine broke out on the 24th, and she's not been back to Kyiv since.

“I just came for five days, for a change of mood, to have some fun, to take some time, to clear my head to prepare for the next festival season of work,” she says.

And though it might not seem much, it's the little things that have started to chip away at her confidence, at her sense of self. Anastasiya used to be, as she describes herself, “a fashionista”. Her wardrobe in Kyiv was full, she shimmered her way through the scene, but she says she doesn't really know who she is any more. Her brother will send some clothes from Kyiv soon, but she's already donated many of them to people there, people who have lost everything. 

She pulls at the sleeves of her hoodie again. At one point she giggles with a charming lack of self-consciousness when she says that she thought “it was always important to be important”, realising that maybe it wasn't.

She's a busy woman, Anastasiya. Or at least she used to be. From her first days at the design institute she moved to Kyiv to study at, her and her friends had made money by embroidering, decorating clothes for fashion designers and pop stars. She says they could do anything by hand and my eyes are drawn again to the eternal plaits in her hair. She went on to work for a designer, travelling to exhibitions, that sort of thing. But then, around 2014, she realised that she didn't need a boss who, as she says, didn't listen to her, and nor did she want one. So she struck out, alone.

“I just jumped onto the water and started to swim,” she says.

Her boyfriend was a producer, so she started managing, doing PR, helping spread the word and putting out fires, she became a promoter, a spokeswoman, the public face and internal engine of Comic Con Ukraine and the White Nights and the street food festivals. 

She misses the constant whirr of action because she's always been able to get things done, to use her contacts, to find solutions to problems. If there was a crisis then she would work it out, it was her job.

Her skills are well honed, for in Kyiv in 2014 there was a fundamental crisis. 

Kyiv's Maidan square - at the heart of the city both geographically, and spiritually, she says, as the point where the big concerts and the parties, and the fayres and events would take place - was occupied, ultimately, by tens of thousands of people, protesting against the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and the corruption and abuses inherent in his regime. 

It was a movement that divided the country in many ways, but also brought much of Anastasiya's generation together. In the protest's earlier days she was a regular visitor. She says there was something about the atmosphere, what she calls the revolutionary mood of the time, that couldn't help but draw her in. 

She felt she could do something important.

So she started doing what she did best, organising. She was letting volunteers stay on her floor or on her sofa. She and her friends set up flea market stalls to raise money to help. She sold off band merchandise at hers, anything she could, plectrums and drum skins and records autographed by big Ukrainian acts because she knew them all. 

And when Russian troops invaded Crimea she and her friends – and every tailor she knew - used the skills they had again. They made bulletproof vests and sent them to the volunteers going to the front. Anastasiya sourced the fabric and the materials for free, she arranged a studio to manufacture them in someone to pack them and someone to deliver them. 

But she can't do much here, in Berlin. She can't even speak the language, it's frustrating as hell. She's staying in the guest-house of a man who works in TV. She knows she's lucky, she's got enough space that friends can come to visit, but still.

“Now after three months... I don't understand who I am,” she says. “In general, I feel like like there's a big wall up, and I can't go back home, I don't know how to go back home.”

But, while at other times she is defiant, bullish almost, she says this plaintively. She says the word 'home' like it's a tennis ball being tossed in the air, her tone goes up and down. She almost howls it.

Kyiv is a cool city, she says, and she'd dreamed of it from the first time she went as a kid. Even when she was at the heart of a scene around a club in her home town of Dnipropetrovsk called Torba - which means either an old bag or to get pissed, depending on who you ask - where she knew all the musicians and the DJ's, she focussed on leaving. 

There's clubs that rival Berghain easily, there's districts that look more like Dubai than Berlin, she says. The effect of Comic Con Ukraine, for example, has been international, and she talks proudly of 'geek culture' and its importance to a generation who might never have connected in person without it. She talks of YouTubers and bloggers and of people being drawn there, when before they'd have otherwise ended up here.

She's in full flow. I ask if everyone in Ukraine is like this, talking and talking and talking, openly and honestly and endlessly, flitting between subjects the way a hummingbird does blooms, her sentences drawing themselves out, stretching over clauses and parentheses like the blue and yellow cotton spun through her plaits, but she says not. She says that in fact she's quite shy, but I don't believe her. 

At least not at that point.

The Müggelsee behind us is choppy. I drink a beer, Anastasiya a lemonade, and we are sitting down at a cafe table. The wind blows across us, whisking the ash out of the superfluous ashtray, and I worry about it blowing across the microphone on my recorder. 

So I push it closer to her at one point, only to withdraw it, unconsciously, a little as she talks of Bucha, where many of her friends had bought apartments because they were cheaper than in Kyiv, and where she had had an office before. Where she'd worked on a project setting up children's playgrounds. 

She says she knows that soldiers had ransacked those very offices, but that was the least of things, because she also knows of rapes and of murders. She says people she knows, colleagues and friends, died in the horrors that engorged the district in April, but she doesn't want to ask who. Her eyes are red, I ask her if she's okay, and she says she is. 

And then she tells me she can give me an “exclusive.” She says this with a nervous giggle that isn't entirely convincing, and one that makes more sense when I think of the way she pulls her sleeves over her hands, and the way her eyes are reddened, and how she seems so determined to convince me that she is okay with all of this - that she'll find a solution, because that's what she always does, despite the fact she's been stuck in the city she came to for a five day holiday four months ago, because her home country has been invaded and is currently at war.  

Anastasiya tells me then that she is also pregnant.

“Yeah,” she says, realising how weird it sounds to say out loud to a stranger.

She says that this is how men and women are in times of war. Men are drawn to fight and women to motherhood.

“I really think that when the war started, and I was like naked nerves, I needed a man who can relax me. It was a surprise, it's just happened, and we didn't talk a lot, we didn't know each other a lot, and we have just started to communicate. He has a lot of his own problems - I am in shock, I don't know what to do,” she says. 

“Life is changing so fast” she says, smiling again.

I tell her this is great news. “Congratulations” I say, and I mean it. I tell her having a baby is easier than you imagine, that the joy outweighs the struggle, which is true, but here and now as I say all this out loud the only thing really clear is that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. For at  least my kids were born in a country of my choosing. 

She carries on though. She always has.

“But, no, I will find a solution. What I need to do - I have free time right now, and not so much work to do - I have time to learn German.”

She also says she wants to train to be a psychologist, she says she knows that it'll help, that it'll be needed in the aftermath of all of this. She's making plans already. She wants to go home desperately, but it's not just her any more. She also says the baby's father is serious, he wants to be there, he's talking of them buying a house in Ukraine when this is all over. He's the one who bought her trainers. But she's being pushed and pulled at from all sides. 

“Space”, she implores. “What's space doing with me?”

But then space had one extra little hurdle to throw in our way in the form of that battered old cat, sloping off to curl up somewhere for eternity. Later she tells me that the cat had limped away while she was asking in a restaurant for help, and I know she went back to the guest-house of the man who works in TV that she is currently living in to worry all about it.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: Tahir

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the fourth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

When we speak, a few days after Filippo Grandi, the head of the UNHCR, released a statement,  confirming that “the ugly reality, that some Black and Brown people fleeing Ukraine – and other wars and conflicts around the world – have not received the same treatment as Ukrainian refugees”, Tahir Della is just off the phone to the Polish / Ukrainian border. 

And though he is in good spirits, and flashes a brilliant, American toothed smile, his frustration still shines through. 

Della says from his office in Kreuzberg that people on the ground are just “sick and tired of it now”. He says that there's no support, nor the political will to help people of colour in their time of need, as they try to flee from the Russian invasion. Or for the sleepless volunteers trying to help them. 

They are sick and tired of still having to fight for something so basic, so fundamental. Sick and tired that a moment of solidarity across Europe in support of a people enduring the most terrifying and barbaric of situations, is still mired in the same old bullshit of different classifications being made for different people of different skin colours. 

Such as the free train tickets offered to refugees. As long as they are European.

He knows all too well that, with grim inevitability, racism will always rear its malignant head in the worst of times, too. 

Della and I talk about the Humboldt Forum, the grotesque reimagining of the Prussian Stadtschloss, filled with the fruits of colonialism. In there is a new exhibition, dedicated to Berlin, patting itself on the back for being modern and cool, daubed with “urban art”, which greets its visitors with a statement about how change in the world could be brought about 'holistically', when it ignores the fact that the system itself is at fault. 

The system that put the exhibition together, that rebuilt the palace, the system that put a tiny piece in the corner about the German genocide in Namibia. 

Though we can't call it that at all. 

“It was horrible, everybody accepts that. It was wrong, against humanity...” he says. “But it wasn't a genocide. Because if it's a genocide you have to take care, responsibility. At least, you apologise for it, and you say, okay, what do the people or the country who have been impacted want from us?”

It's like he's in Catch 22.

“We have accepted for a long time that this happened, but we don't want to be responsible for it. We can do things, make announcements, we can sign petitions, just so we don't have to look at ourselves.”

But we come back to Ukraine again and again. It's an extension of the same fight he's been fighting for years. 

Della says that he understands the closer proximity of Ukraine to Germany is a factor. He is German, he was born in Munich, of course he understands. So he's sick and tired, too, that the capacity of Europe to help refugees can be so malleable all of a sudden, when it was previously too stretched to help pluck children out of the Mediterranean to save them from drowning. 

It goes on and on. He doesn't want less help for Ukrainians, it's not a game, he knows how many have died, how many are terrified for their lives there. He just wants the same amount of help for everyone. He's just had two Senegalese staying in his small flat, having come to Berlin before they can to France. Della speaks no French, and they no German, but it worked out okay, he says. They understood each other pretty well.

When Tahir Della was young his American Grandfather told him a story about his own uncle in Louisiana. 

“He was a carpenter for a white company and he was waiting for almost two months to get paid. And when the money still didn't come he went to Baton Rouge to find out what was happening... and he never came back.”

He repeats himself, for even now the story is so tragic, its conclusion so callous, it doesn't make sense.

“He never came back.”

“Nobody knows still today what happened to him...  and the thing that was really moving... or...” He pauses again, for there are really no words fitting to the feelings this brought up in the young Della, in either the English or German languages that he flits between with such a lightness of tongue.

“...there was no structure back then where black people could go and say 'we are missing somebody from our family'. There was no legal body who could go and investigate when somebody is just gone. And that's not even a  hundred years ago, that was in the 40's of the last century.”

It wasn't the only story like that his Grandfather had. But that's why the older man was so proud when Della took his somehow inevitable place - with a spit-bucket and a gumshield and a towel in his hand, and a courageous streak a mile wide within him - in the corner of all the people of colour in his country. 

Now, in his 60's, Della is still there in that corner. 

He was on the board of the Initiative for Black People in Germany (ISD) til 2019 and is their spokesman. He's fought against the continuing riches reaped from colonialism, against double standards and hypocrisy, and against the racism inherent within the system itself, for more than half his life. 

He joined the ISD in the eighties, a group of advocates and activists founded by the likes of the poet, writer and academic, May Ayim, of whose 'daily deflowahin a di spirit,' and
'evryday erowshan a di soul' the great dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote in his paean, 'Reggae Fi May Ayim'.

And now if you walk along the southern bank of the Spree - once the industrial heart of Berlin, crammed with warehouses and factories until it was bombed to the ground, which would then become transformed as clubs like Dimitri Hegemann's UFO sprung up just around the corner, playing techno, black music from Detroit - Underground Resistance, lest we forget! – you will now see Ayim's name, having replaced that of the original Gröbenufer. 

Della says he knew Ayim for years. They were about the same age, they fought the same battles, but drifted apart as she withdrew into herself before her tragic death in 1996. But her role in the organisation was  never forgotten, her soul never completely eroded even if her spirit grew deflowered. Della played a large role in the renaming of the river bank in her honour and he remembers fondly the day they could finally celebrate her immortalisation. 

There were speeches and there was music and the sun was bright in the sky.

“It was a beautiful event,” he says, his sentence dripping with understatement.

He's not one to talk himself or his own efforts up. But the following lines from 'Reggae Fi May Ayim' - 'Tru all di learnin, Di teachin, Rizistin, An assistin, Di lovin, Di givin, Organizin, An difyin' - could have been written about him, too.

He's been doing all of these things since this war began, too. In the face of what he sees as mainstream apathy at best, of ignorance and intentional silence at worst. It's pretty simple, really. 

Ever since his Grandfather told him that story about his murdered uncle, he felt he had little other choice.

Della has worked in theatres, he's driven a cab. Anything, really, he says, to pay the  bills while he concentrates on the bigger things. But mostly he worked as a photographer. It was commercial stuff, he'd shoot for adverts, and he's quick to say  that he has never considered himself an artist, that his view of the world is that of a political activist. But the two  things almost certainly inform each other. He has to be able to view things with a certain detachment. 

He has to be able to let neither his righteous anger nor his natural romanticism get in the way of his vision. He has to be able to explain soberly what he sees, so we can understand it better.

“We have a very small, narrowed narrow view on what racism is,” he says. “For many, racism is skinheads, Nazis, you know...” 

He says that we think it is only about intent, but that this is an act of self-delusion. 

“This is the same for the institutions. The police, they say they cant be racist because they are working according to the Grundgesetz. As many people say 'okay, you know, I have black friends though, how can I be racist?' Or, 'I  live in Neukölln, you know...'

“This is really a problem, because as long as you can't identify or accept that there is a problem with racism, you are not coming to a point where you can deal with it. We have to listen to those who complain, who say they are afflicted by it on a daily basis.”

And now he is facing this new fight, a continuation of all the others that came before, certainly, but complicated by the fact that, though there are organisations similar to ISD in Poland and Ukraine, they are far less established, less significant, less well funded.

And let's be frank; Tahir Della is far from optimistic when it comes to the chances of Olaf Scholz's new government addressing the institutional racism that is affecting tens of thousands of people of colour fleeing the horrors of the war in Ukraine.

He laughs when I ask, spontaneous, loud and true. He makes it seem like such a stupid question. 

It won't stop him trying to do what he can though.

“From the first day on after the beginning of the war it became clear that there was a big problem. I never had thought - honestly, I really didn't expect this. Because we didn't know. We are speaking of 70,000 people. 70,000 people of colour who don't dare to think 'what will happen with us?' 

But even now, knowing everything he knows, everything he's learned in the face of this brutality and of the innocent people caught up in it, he still seems shocked.

“That,” he says, “I didn't expect that on such a scale.”

***
Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Five Questions for... John Rooney

By Sara Bellini

One of our favourite Berlin bookshops has recently reopened its doors - with a new look, in a new location - and we couldn’t be more thrilled. After the non renewal of their rental contract back in August, Curious Fox. had been absent from the Berlin map until this February, when it moved to Lausitzer Platz in Kreuzberg. While walking down the stairs that lead you to the bookshop, you step under a beautiful black and white mural depicting the new neighbourhood, the nearby overground train, and of course a fox.

The hand behind the artwork is that of Derry-born illustrator John Rooney. “The owners Orla & Dave are good friends of mine and asked me to work on a larger mural on the exterior of the new shop. Unfortunately I had just decided to leave Berlin at the time and thought a smaller mural inside would be more feasible. Myself and Orla are keen bird enthusiasts so I included a kestrel and a jay (which live in the trees opposite the shop). I drew some buildings from the neighbourhood too. It was a very fun way to spend my last week in Berlin.” 

You might have seen some of his works in Standart magazine or on windows and walls across Berlin - and Ireland. Drawing inspiration from pop culture (cult movies, sci-fi and literature), nature (he has a dog collage series) and architecture (check out his cityscapes), each composition strikes us for its dynamicity and layers of details, perfectly balanced between accuracy and artistry. If you are curious about the aesthetic potential of the garden spider, the common pipistrelle bat or the Portuguese man o’ war, have a look at his wildlife map of Ireland. No snakes obviously. 

In his hand-drawn bird collages and wildlife maps, John Rooney presents a place through its fauna, giving equal importance to the tiny creatures and the majestic ones. The latest addition to its portfolio is the wildlife map of Canada, with over 480 species checked by experts at the Biodôme in Montréal. 

According to his bio, “John has not stopped drawing things ever since he was the age of three”, and we are glad to hear he has no plan to stop any time soon. We caught up with him just before he left Berlin, where he had been based for the past four years, to embark on adventures around the world.

What does home mean to you?

A place where you feel at peace and have people around you that you care about. Cliched, I know, but it's that simple for me.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I'm not sure if you'll accept a place that doesn't exist anymore but I'd have to say a pub called the 'Bound for Boston' in Derry where I spent most of my late teens / early twenties. It was always full of sound people and had great bands playing every week. I have a lot of great memories there. I do love Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin too. 

What is beyond your front door?

Not much right now to be honest. I'm living in the suburbs of Derry and the nearest pub is 15 minutes away and it's dodgy as fuck. Although there's some football pitches behind my house that have a lot of nice trees with bullfinches and siskins flying around the place.

What place would you most like to visit?

I'd love to just stand at the foot of Mount Everest just to see it and take it in.

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

I'm currently reading a comedy book called Mickey Doc by a Derry author called Fintan Harvey. I'm watching the Kanye documentary and also Lovecraft Country. I'm listening to some Junior Brother and a lot of Kylie, who I rediscovered after watching an episode of 'Reeling in the Years' on RTE.

John Rooney's Website
John Rooney on Instagram

Five Questions for… Igor Tereshkov

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

By Sara Bellini 

Igor Tereshkov refers to one of his works as “a visual anthropological exploration”, and no label would fit more suitably. Non-places, surveillance, post-soviet urbanism, the interrelation of natural and built environment are among the themes he delves into in a variety of medium spanning from documentary photography to visual art to performance.. 

His latest project consists of extra large cyanotypes examining our relationship with nature and waste. The idea came to him a few years ago when he was collecting plastic litter near water zones with Greenpeace. “It’s in some way a homage to Anna Atkins’s work about diversity of algae and in another way a documentation and didactic enumeration cataloguing the types and ways of using plastic in our everyday life.” 

The next step in the process consists in exposing the images of the discarded plastic on the leaves from the very bushes and trees where he had found them. “All this in order to convey an idea that plastic is made, not grown [...] This is kind of a remake to the slogan of the famous ketchup, which claims that it is grown, not made, which can’t be said about the plastic bottle in which it’s often packed - as well as many other products”. 

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

Experimental photographic techniques and the anthropocene are recurring elements in Igor’s creative practice. In 2018/2019 he went to Western Siberia to document the environmental destruction caused by petrol extraction from oil companies in the region inhabited by the Kanthy people. 

The result is a collection of beautiful yet eerie black and white shots covered in dark stains, obtained by developing the film in water containing traces of oil he had previously bottled on the spot. The oil randomly corrodes the film gelatin, in the same way it damages the land, endangering the Indigenous People that had been living there for centuries. By mixing water with oil in the development stage, Igor literally allows the subject to become part of the creative process.

To accompany this interview, Elsewhere is publishing previously unseen pictures Igor took on a trip from Poland to Germany two years ago. “I had two rolls of film and a bottle of wine, later I soaked the exposed film in leftovers of wine and called this series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup... Later I lost the film in the lab and all I have is just these forgotten scans.”

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

What does home mean to you?

Home for me is usually a place to regenerate and to find balance so, more often than not, for me it’s more likely not a place but a process. And of course, speaking of home, I always want to mean safety, clarity and love. I have a firm feeling that I haven’t found yet my home at 100%,  rather a place for a respite.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I think it’s Ai-Petri, the peak of Mount St. Peter in Crimea. It’s not so big or world famous but I’ve spent many summers there during my childhood. With the whole family we would ride on a car across the peninsula and the Ai-Petri was always a special place. Every time I watch an old VHS family record it always makes me feel a special connection to that place and my childhood.

What is beyond your front door?

Four stair steps and a blue spruce, after ten footsteps there is a hammock and after twenty more footsteps a large and old spruce that would take three or four people to embrace completely. For the past three years I’ve been living in the Moscow exurb in my old family dacha.

What place would you most like to visit?

I hope one day I’ll have an opportunity to visit California.

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

Right now I’m reading Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience by Alexander Etkind , watching the new season of The Walking Dead and listening mostly to Tycho while running.

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

Igor Tereshkov's Website
Igor Tereshkov on Instagram

Between the Forest and the Sea

By Sara Bellini:

I don’t know why the sea. I like expanding my gaze, following the waves in reverse until they reach the horizon and the water dissolves into the sky. It must be this idea of infinity - the line you can never reach, the water you cannot quantify - and of all the things that exist beyond the horizon and that I hold in my gaze without seeing them; another coast; another country; people and birds and trees. And while I contemplate these transcendental thoughts, I hear the waves in the background, repetitive and calming, always the same and always different.

When I was a child, we’d have a seaside holiday every year, and yet the sea of my childhood is different than that of my adulthood. The first one symbolised summer, ice-cream, playing and swimming, while the latter is more often a place of cold wind, of fish and chips, of walking and healing. This new relationship was forged around a decade ago, when I was living in London and unhappily so. Work was stressful and I needed to slow down. The lack of time, money and energy dictated my escape route: a Southern Railway train to Brighton. Every few months I would spend a day there, more rarely a night or two. I didn’t do anything special. I just wandered for hours and stared at the sea. 

When I found myself in a similarly strenuous situation a couple of years ago, with no possibility of taking significant time off work, I thought of the sea again. The closest option from Berlin was the Baltic. My friend K. also needed to step out of her life for a moment, so we stepped out of our lives together, at the same time anchoring each other in order to avoid drifting away. 

The trip itself was serendipitous, but the reason behind it was rooted in our existential impasse and the tiredness of not being able to find a way out. In our perception we were akin to severely ill pious women on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Our Lourdes was nature. It was the sea.

If you take a train from Berlin up to what the Germans call the Ostsee, you reach a city called Stralsund. But the railway doesn’t stop there - it arches over the water to land again on Rügen. The island is connected to the mainland via a bridge, it’s that close. And yet, like every island, it is its own world. 

“Beyond their actual geographical coordinates, islands will always be places we project onto, places which we cannot get a hold on through scientific methods but through literature.”*

Rügen became famous during the 18th century, when the Romantics made art of nature and in nature itself found the sublime. It was the painter Caspar David Friedrich who showed the world the charm of the island, its stunning white cliffs covered in leafy trees on a background of cobalt and till sea. The Romantics had good taste and heavy moods, and we followed in their steps with a ravenous hunger for the sublime, looking for something that would overwhelm us with beauty and shake us out of our skin.

The core of our stay on the island was an excursion to Jasmund National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site in the north-eastern part of Rügen. To be precise, UNESCO granted the title to the primeval beech forests in Germany, which shaped the whole continent after the last Ice Age, and have been severely damaged by human intervention. The title is there to keep these ecosystems intact, to protect them from us.

Tourists visit the park every year, mainly to see the impressive chalk cliff known as Königsstuhl. K. and I found it rather curious how people would pay to step on a platform on the cliff, rather than admiring it for free from an adjacent cliff. This is named for Victoria of Prussia (daughter of the English Queen Victoria) by her father-in-law Kaiser Wilhelm I, because she loved that spot. We thought about how the fact that someone once found that particular cliff so lovely brought someone with temporal power to give it a name and put it on a map, initiating a process of conservation and meaning-giving. It reminded us of the many ways in which human and natural history were intertwined, and how the former - shorter and more insignificant - has so often tried to claim the latter.

From the Victoria-Sicht we walked along the Hochufer - the path following the shoreline down below - dipping in and out of the woodland. It looked like some trees were growing from the rock walls, almost parallel to the sea underneath. A sign told us that the cliffs were made of chalk, which has the property of freezing during the winter and then thawing once more in spring. When that happens, the cliffs crumble down, taking pieces of the forest with them. This process is called natural erosion and it made me muse on the idea that the island we were on was the same island of Friedrich’s, but also significantly different. If I go back to Rügen every year, I thought, it will always be a geologically altered place, where the cliffs scratch and reshape themselves ever so slightly each spring: an island of entropy.

That was the first time I’ve walked in a forest on a cliff, and it was sensorially baffling. The smell of the wet ground and understory mixed up with the saltiness, whose scent was coming in waves, mirroring the water that generated it. On our right slugs and mushrooms, and on our left swans and a lonely red sail. 

All of a sudden we had to stop, stupefied and awed, on a man-made path descending towards the sea. The dappled light made everything look green: our hands, our faces, the ground. The phenomenon appeared almost fairy-like, and we felt like we were about to metamorphose into sylvan creatures. The light seemed to possess a tangible quality, a volume, a physical presence. A few steps away, everything looked normal, and wooden stairs led us down to a pebbled beach.

We sat in the sun, enjoying the marine breeze and the glistening depth of the Baltic. We had swum the day before and we would swim again the day after, allowing the cold water to remodel our skin and turn us into marine creatures, dissolving the distance between us and the natural world where we craved to belong.

Walking in the woods was a richly immersive experience and we felt we were part of our surroundings, just like the birches and the chaffinches, the fungi and the mosses. Our minds were too busy processing all these inputs, in being present, that we didn’t have the time to get caught up in anxious thoughts about the future and the lives we had briefly put on hold. Wasn’t that what we were looking for - a reminder that we were made of the same matter of the sea and the forest? The cliffs themselves didn’t worry about anything, including their own demise, so it felt silly to do anything other than simply being.

The trees suddenly ended at the outskirts of the village of Sassnitz. We walked silently under the sun to reach the station, barely meeting any other people. As our bodies moved from nature to tarmac interspersed with rose-studded gardens, our headspace shifted from a present mode to our city-life mode, at the same time leaning forward towards the future while looking backward at the past. And yet we knew we had left some of our worries back in Jasmund National Park, perhaps lifted up by the birch branches while we were staring at the green light.

We started and ended our stay on the island in the same way, with fish and chips and a cup of coffee from a stand near the beach in Binz. At that moment, it was the best fish and chips we had ever had.

 ***

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

* Judith Schalansky, Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands

Bearing Witness

Barney Sidler and Zeev Borger

By Paul Scraton:

On a soft summer evening in Weimar we walk through the traffic-free streets of the historic city centre, this monument to German culture with its theatres and museums, palaces and music schools, town of humanism and the Enlightenment. In the square where Goethe and Schiller stand in front of the theatre they look down upon a typical summer scene, as young people gather at their feet to drink beer while football matches are screened to the terraces of cafes and restaurants as, in the beer garden over in the corner, a live concert is about to start.

Throughout the city there are signs that it is awakening from the pandemic. There are posters for concerts and plays, puppet shows and readings, exhibitions and fairs. Bach and Liszt. Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm. Gropius and Kandinsky. Outside Goethe’s old illustration studio, paintings hang beneath the windows of an art school while across the way music drifts out from the rehearsal rooms of the university.

This is Weimar? What does the name Weimar mean to you? A small town in Germany made great through art and words and music. A place that gave us the Bauhaus and named the democratic republic that would emerge from the devastation of the First World War battlefields. And yet, north of the centre, as we walk up towards the railway station from the New Museum, a collection of faces remind us of the other side of Weimar’s story. That this is a town that played host to some of the heights of German culture and also, up there on the hillside, some of its deepest depths. 

Because Weimar is also Buchenwald, the concentration camp on the Ettersberg that was opened in 1937 by the Nazis and would claim the lives of more than 56,000 who were held there. The bus that takes you from the town to the camp follows what became known as the ‘Blood Road’ even while the camp was in existence. If you want to walk, there is another route, a ten-kilometre trail that starts at the railway station and follows the route of the Buchenwald Railway, along which many of the inmates were taken to the camp.

Petro Mischtschuk

The stories of Buchenwald are part of the story of Weimar, and are tied to the city via the Blood Road and the old railway tracks. Within the city itself we discover stories of Goethe and Schiller, of Bach and Liszt and Strauss and Wieland and Hummel and all the other greats who lived and worked here. They have their museums and their exhibits, and they give their names to streets, schools and squares. And since 2019 they have had some company, joined along Weimar’s streets by the faces of some other, less well-known names.

Pavel Tichomirow
Andrej Moisejenko
Chaim Bukszpan
Vasile Nußbaum
Heinrich Rotmensch
Naftali Fürst
Alina Dabrowska
Petro Mischtschuk
Ottomar Rothmann
Gilberto Salmoni
Barney Sidler
Boris Romantschenko
Zeev Borger
Alojzy Maciak
Aleksandr Bytschok
Magda Brown
Eva Fahidi-Pusztai
Günter Pappenheim
Josef Falkash
Raymond Renaud
Tadeusz Kowalski
Zbigniew Pec

These men and women are just some of the more than a quarter of a million people who passed through Buchenwald or its subcamps. They were photographed by the Weimar artist Thomas Müller for Die Zeugen (The Witnesses), an exhibition that can be found in the north of Weimar between the New Museum and the station. The aim of this exhibition is relatively clear to all who emerge from the station on their walk down into town. It is to make this part of history visible and, in the words of the exhibition organisers, to ‘invite the people of Weimar and their guests to consciously pause for a minute.’

The twenty-two faces that make up the exhibition are of twenty-two survivors of the camps. They were brought to Buchenwald from Poland, Hungary, France, Ukraine, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Belarus and elsewhere in Germany. They were held for being Jewish or as political prisoners or for forced labour. By the time Müller took their pictures, they were old. In the meantime, since the exhibition was opened in April 2019, at least one of their number has passed away.

Alojzy Maciak

These are people who have been to Weimar. They were taken to the hillside where Goethe once walked, held in a camp that had been cleared from the forest. They are the witnesses to what was done in the name of Germany within sight of this symbol of German culture. And with these photographs, the town recognises them as it does its other sons and daughters. In Weimar, there are many different stories to be told and all shall have their say. All need to be heard.

On a soft summer evening we walk through Weimar. Twenty-two faces. Most are still with us to bear witness, to tell us what happened behind those gates and the barbed wire fences. Looking at them now, it is sad to think that we do not have much time left. All too soon there will be no one left to remember, at the very time nationalism is on the rise across the continent and the history of what happened in places like Buchenwald is beginning to be rewritten. In this atmosphere, as we slowly lose those who can tell us what happened in the camps, it is up to the rest of us to continue the work of remembering. Of how we got from Weimar to Buchenwald, from one end of the Blood Road to the other. The names of the victims and what was done to them, and those who survived to give us their testimony. We need to keep listening and we need to keep speaking their truth.  

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place

Bitter Meadow – January in Bochum

By Marcel Krueger:

There are many bridges in Bochum. Sadly they never cross any water, but only ever rails, concrete and motorways. 

I've been in the urban sprawl of the Ruhr area since early December. My wife has started a new job here and we've rented a small apartment in the center of the city, planning to divide our time between Ireland and Germany in the coming year. I came here when the last lockdown in Ireland ended, with plans to go back to Ireland in January. But now the renewed lockdowns in both Germany and Ireland have prevented me from returning and spending January in my crooked house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. So for the last weeks I've been strolling around Bochum, which is a completely new place for me. 

As I always do to get a feeling for a place, I sought out destinations that would link me to the past of the city in the 20th century: honorary graves of people who died during the upheavals of the Kapp Putsch and in the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920, disused railway lines, former coal mines all over town. It is almost impossible to walk around Bochum and not encounter leftovers of this former main industry of the city: overgrown slag heaps, ventilation shafts, metal towers and red-brick buildings of former collieries are everywhere, and even if they  have been dismantled the former pits are still indicated by street names, subway stations and memorial plaques.  

But mainly I tried to revisit tragedies of the past. I really couldn't say why I always tend to do this. There is a certain level of escapism and horror, learning more about the terrifying things that humans had inflicted upon them by other humans as a privileged white European with a certain conviction that I'm safe from these horrors. Yet there is also an aspect of comparison to today, always: of how easy it is for totalitarian and populist regimes to lure people in and make them willing collaborators, a thing that is worth constantly reiterating. And it is also always revealing to see what a city choses to remember and honour officially, and what it chooses to forget; like the swastika on the helmet of a statue on a war memorial that had been erected in the central city park in 1935, only toppled by activists in 1983.

Some of these locations and sites I chose deliberately, upon others I just stumbled by coincidence, like the memorial dedicated to the men from the Hamme suburb who went and died in the wars of 1866 and 1870/71 in side street: Carl Hake from Hamme joined the 2nd company of the 53 infantry regiment, marched off towards the south and died fighting the Austrians in the Battle of Königgrätz on the 3rd of July 1866, far from home.    

On another walk I came upon a small park, one that seemed deserted. Paved trails and gravel paths sneaked around small hills on which thorn bushes and small trees grew, under the arms of massive electricity pylons looming overhead and a forlorn, low-hanging grey sky. I came across what looked like a piece of concrete wall topped with a rusted metal bar, and only as I stood close did I realise that there were words embossed in the metal bar. In German, it read: "A strict regime prevailed in the camp. At night people died in their bunks, then in the morning the living got up and went to work." 

During World War II the Saure Wiese, the Bitter Meadow, was one of 15 forced labour camps of the Bochumer Verein, one of the main steel and arms producers of Bochum and the Ruhr area and one of over 100 labour camps for forced labourers in Bochum and neighbouring Wattenscheid, a suburb today but a town in its own right back then. The people incarcerated here were mostly so-called Ostarbeiter, Eastern Workers, deported from the Ukraine and Russia, who had to work in the ironworks across nearby Essener Strasse, still in existence today as the Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe Bochum plant. In 1943, the camp had 765 Ostarbeiter and 290 "various foreigners" according to the records, who had to live here in subhuman conditions: they worked in 12-hours shifts seven days a week, and daily rations mostly consisted of watery turnip soup and 150 grams of bread. Viktor Schmitko was deported as a 16-year-old and brought to Bochum, where he worked from 1942 to 1945 and talked about his experiences 50 years later:

"We went to sleep and woke up only thinking of food. We went to sleep hungry and got up hungry again. That was hard to bear. I worked in the forge at the hot press with hot metal, that was hard work, on Sundays we also had to work, doing repairs, unloading wagons, that was hard too."

When Allied troops approached Bochum in spring 1945, the camps were dissolved and the surviving workers taken away in death marches and rail transports. The Gestapo shot 20 forced labourers in their headquarters, a confiscated villa at Bergstraße 76, just a few hours before US troops marched in, and buried their bodies in bomb craters in the city park.

Reconciliation with the fate of the Ostarbeiter and the camp at Saure Wiese did not happen immediately. First the remaining barracks were used for people whose houses had been destroyed in bombing raids, or German refugees from the eastern provinces. And then the area was buried under poison. The site had been used as landfill already before the war, but with the increased reconstruction and industrial output of Bochum after 1945 it was again used as a dumping ground for industrial waste. This continued until 1973, when it became clear that heavy metals and cyanides had reached the groundwater and almost completely polluted and killed nearby Ahbach creek.

The site remained a wasteland for the next decades, and only in 2007 was remediation work carried out. 45,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil were replaced, and at the same time the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime approached the city of Bochum and informed them of the history of the site. It was then decided to turn it into a memorial park that commemorates the camp and the fate of the forced labourers, but also invites visitors to actively engage with the fascist history of the area.

In 2012 the park I first discovered was opened: 10,000 plants and trees had been planted and a park of 65,000 square metres created. The ground plan of a barrack is reconstructed by stone blocks and several information boards document the history of the site; dotted around the park are parts of the artwork entitled "Laute Stille", Loud Silence, created by Bochum artist Marcus Kiel: the pieces of concrete and metal I encountered. Quotes from former forced labourers are cut into rusty steel strips, the harsh quotes intentionally contrasting with the quiet landscape.

When I visited it, the site of the former camp seemed eerily misplaced. Even though I found myself in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe, surrounded by millions of people and with one of the largest steel plants of the state just across the road, under the grey winter sky filled with sleet that crackled on the lines between the electricity pylons it felt like a much more remote site, like a former camp of the Moorsoldaten on the heath in Lower Saxony or place of long-lost tragedy somewhere in rural Brandenburg.  

I came to be immediately fascinated by the site, and have returned there a few times now, always discovering new paths, new leftovers of history: half-buried tracks leading nowhere, blackened and cracked concrete foundations in the undergrowth.  Maybe I return here because the setting and the emotions I project the former inmates to have left here correspond to my mood these days, constantly slightly on edge, constantly mistrusting my fellow man. But then I also discovered that the park is never really deserted, and encountered dog walkers, joggers and mothers pushing buggies through the gloom, all keeping their social distance while doing the same thing as I do, exercising outdoors. I wonder what the park looks like in summer: it is surely not shunned by the people from the nearby estates, and even if they bring blankets and beer and sandwiches, and play frisbee on the largest of the hills on a summer weekend it would not be disrespectful but appropriate.    

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

9 November, Berlin-Pankow

By Paul Scraton:

On this 9 November in Berlin the city is shrouded in fog as we leave our apartment on Osloer Straße. The last few days have been glorious, days made for walking, lingering in the autumn sunshine, but today the weather has closed in as we set off along the leaf-clogged pavement. But despite the change in the weather, I’m starting my week with a walk, a stroll from where I live in Gesundbrunnen across the old Berlin Wall border to Pankow, a deliberate choice for this particular morning, on this particular date.

The 9 November is Germany’s Schicksaltag, its day of fate. As I cross the bridge by the S-Bahn station at Bornholmer Straße I pass by a series of photographs from this day 31 years ago when the border was opened and thousands of people flooded across from the East to the West on the night the Berlin Wall came down. On this date in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm was forced to abdicate in the November Revolution that ended the monarchy in Germany. On this date in 1923, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch failed in a volley of police bullets in Munich. And on this date in 1938, the November pogrom against the Jews was unleashed, an attack on their synagogues, their property and their lives, during which 400 were killed. In the days that followed, a further 30,000 Jews would be arrested, taken to the camps where many would later perish. 

There is much to remember on this date in this city, and it has brought me to Westerlandstraße. I walk slowly along the pavement, counting down the houses until I reach number sixteen. I could have picked any number of addresses in my home city to walk to this morning, but this is the one I have chosen. In front of the house the leaves have piled up by the entranceway, covering up much of the pavement. I need to brush them aside in order to find what I am looking for, the three bronze cobblestones laid in the ground just in front of the door. Three cobblestones, one for each person: Conrad Danziger. Frieda Danziger. Emil Elie Leyser.

All three called Westerlandstraße 16 home. Conrad was an architect, who lived here with his wife Frieda from 1935. At some point after 1939, in the words of their neighbours who witnessed the event, the couple were “collected” by the authorities and taken to what was called a “Jewish Apartment” on Köpenicker Straße. On 2 March 1943, Conrad was deported to Auschwitz. On 16 June 1943, Frieda was also taken from the city, first to Theresienstadt and then later to Auschwitz. Emil, known as Elie, was their neighbour. He had lived on Westerlandstraße since 1931 with his wife Margarete, his son Leopold, Leopold’s wife Grete and their daughter Karin. Emil was arrested in 1939 and was also deported to Auschwitz on the 2 March 1943, where he was almost immediately murdered. Leopold and his family were deported to Chelmno/Kulmhof, where all three were killed. What happened to Margarete is as yet unknown. 

In front of the house on Westerlandstraße, everything is quiet. I look down at these three stones that represent three lives, all lived here in Berlin-Pankow, all extinguished in Auschwitz. Even the main road at the end of the street seems to be less busy than one would expect on a Monday morning. Perhaps it is the impact of the latest lockdown, perhaps it has something to do with the weather. Kneeling on the pavement, I try to polish the Stolpersteine, these stumbling stones that have been laid for Conrad, Frieda and Elie, the best I can. Across Germany and in other places in Europe where these stones have been laid, others will be doing the same. Polishing and placing a candle or a flower on these tiny memorials laid in the ground. Memorials that put names to the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust. Memorials that help us to tell their stories. 

I make my way back slowly through the back streets of Pankow to Bornholmer Straße, past the last of surviving embassies that were built here in GDR times, crossing the bridge once more above the railway tracks that once served as a border between two worlds. The history of Berlin can sometimes weigh heavy on this city of ours, where every street seems to contain a memorial and every date in the calendar marks some kind of anniversary. So much so that it is often very easy to miss them, to pass by without a second glance or let the dates slip by unremarked. But it remains important to remember, and perhaps today more than ever. 

Although the biographical information on the Stolpersteine is, by design, starkly limited, the Stolpersteine Berlin website has done a fantastic job of creating an online archive of life stories for many of those remembered through these tiny memorials, including the lives of Conrad Danziger, Frieda Danziger and Emil Elie Leyser, who lived at Westerlandstraße 16.

***
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

By Paul Scraton:

Sometime around 2011 or 2012 I was in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, browsing the shelves of the Grove Bookshop. There, in a section devoted to nature writing and the outdoors, I found a slender volume called The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. This book, written around the end of the Second World War and first published in 1977, has become a touchstone of landscape and place writing in the decade or so since Canongate published it in a new edition with an introduction from Robert Macfarlane. It has been translated into a number of different languages and its author, who died in 1981, now graces the Scottish five-pound note. Quite the result for a book that had sat, quietly in a drawer, for more than three decades after Shepherd wrote it.

In the Canongate edition, The Living Mountain is only just over a hundred pages long, and yet within that short space Shepherd creates a richly detailed portrait of a place that was so important to her throughout her life – the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. If I remember correctly, I read it in one evening at my mum’s house in Menston, and as so often happens with a book like this, it became connected in my imagination not only to the place it is actually about, but also the place where I read it.

I don’t know the Cairngorms very well. I have only been to that corner of Scotland a couple of times, both in childhood, and so I cannot be sure if my memories of the landscape are real, or based on other sources, not least Shepherd’s wonderfully descriptive prose. But picking up the book again this week, I found myself reminded not only of the Scottish landscapes I have known, but also the moors above my mum’s house and the walks we took during that visit nearly ten years ago, with Shepherd’s words still echoing around my head.

Indeed, it is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to The Living Mountain is that a piece of writing so deeply connected to and rooted in a specific place, can have such resonance with someone who has nearly no personal experience of it. Perhaps it is because all of us who love the outdoors have our own version of what Shepherd felt when she walked out once more into the Cairngorms. For us it might be the Welsh hills or the Baltic coast, a Yorkshire moor or a Brandenburg forest, but we understand Shepherd’s depth of feeling because we feel it too. 

The cover artwork of ‘The Living Mountain’, the new album by Jenny Sturgeon, photo by Hannah Bailey

What is true of books is even more true of music. There are so many songs and albums that are connected in my brain to a certain moment, a time of my life and a particular place. A youth hostel room in Slovenia, the snow falling at the window. A border-crossing in Switzerland, in the middle of the night. A road trip through Spain and the volcanic landscapes of Cabo de Gata. Of course, these songs are not about those places, but they became forever linked with them in my imagination. So I was intrigued to see what happened when I listened to a new album by the singer-songwriter Jenny Sturgeon, who has written and recorded her own The Living Mountain, a collection of songs inspired by Nan Shepherd’s book.

As well as the album, released earlier this month, there will also be accompanying films by Shona Thomson which will be hopefully toured next year, and Sturgeon has also found time to record The Living Mountain Podcast, a series of conversations with artists, writers and ecologists about their own connections with the mountains, outdoor places and how they inspire and influence their work.

It often feels, with projects like this, that the great test of the work of art inspired by another is whether it can stand up on its own right. And while it is certainly true that, listening to Jenny Sturgeon’s songs with Nan Shepherd’s book at your elbow, it is easy to hear the conversation between them, the strength of The Living Mountain (the album) is that the songs work in and of themselves. It was a long time since I’d read the book when I first listened to Sturgeon’s album, and what I heard was something poetic, beautiful and haunting, and I think this would have been the case even if I had never read Shepherd’s work at all. 

At the end of Sturgeon’s podcast episodes she asks her guests if they have a piece of music that connects them to the landscapes and places they have been talking about in their conversation. The greatest compliment I can give The Living Mountain as an album is that I have continued to hear it, echoing in my head as Nan Shepherd’s prose did before, long after the album has finished and I’ve left the house to go for a walk by the river or in the woods. Something tells me that Sturgeon’s voice and songs will be with me for a long time, and will take me back to these autumn days in Berlin and Brandenburg, forever linked to this particular time and these particular places. It’s quite a way from the high plateau of the Cairngorms to the flatlands of northeastern Germany, but for this listener at least, they are now connected through the words and music of Jenny Sturgeon. 

***

You can find out more about Jenny Sturgeon and the Living Mountain project, including the podcast, on her website. The album was released in October 2020 by Hudson Records. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is published by Canongate. Order it through your local independent bookshop.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His next book, In the Pines, is a novella about a lifelong connection to the forest and will be published by Influx Press in 2021.